The federal role in higher education has grown over the past two decades, and now a new administration has the opportunity to strengthen policies that support students and their colleges and universities. To help inform these decisions, the Urban Institute convened a bipartisan group of scholars and policy advisers to write a series of memos highlighting some of the most critical issues in higher education and recommending policy solutions. This report argues that the system of federally guaranteed private students loans was seriously flawed and should not be revived, but that more private financing would be an improvement, particularly for lending to parents and graduate students. ; Urban Institute
This study shows how interest group-party relations, parties' cross-cutting policy preferences, and competition with challenger parties shape the structure of issue competition on climate policy. It uses the 'most similar' cases of the UK and Ireland to show how differences in party systems influence the structure of issue competition. Theoretically, the study takes up the challenge of integrating salience and position in the conceptualisation of climate policy preferences. Empirically, it provides new evidence on factors influencing climate policy preferences and the party politics of climate change, focusing on interest groups, party ideology, and challenger parties. Further, it identifies similarities between the general literature on interest group influence on party preferences and the literature on interest groups in climate politics, and seeks to make connections between them.
This paper analyzes the welfare effects of capital tax coordination in a simple model of fiscal competition where fiscal policy is subject to majority voting & households differ with respect to their labor & capital income. It turns out that a coordinated capital tax increase may raise or reduce welfare, depending on the relative magnitude of (1) economic distortions induced by a labor tax & (2) political distortions resulting from the influence of the median voter on fiscal policy decisions. A negative welfare effect is more likely: the smaller the marginal excess burden of the labor tax, the smaller the ratio of the median voter's labor income to average labor income. We also use empirical estimates of the marginal excess burden of taxation to determine the welfare effects of tax coordination; it turns out that a negative welfare effect of coordinated tax increases may emerge in our model for empirically reasonable parameters. 2 Appendixes, 22 References. Adapted from the source document.
This article reviews the social science literature on tax competition in three steps. The first step is to look at the baseline model of tax competition on which most of the literature implicitly or explicitly builds. The key feature is that governments in a context of open borders will engage in wasteful competition for mobile economic assets and activities through tax reductions. The second step is to focus more closely on tax-induced cross-border mobility. Do tax payers actually shift assets and activities across borders in response to differences in taxation? The main message of the literature is that the scope for tax arbitrage depends crucially on the legal rules governing the taxation of cross-border activities and that the intensity of tax arbitrage varies greatly across different taxes. The final step is to analyze government reactions to tax arbitrage. Do they engage in competitive tax cutting as predicted by the baseline model? The literature discusses various strategies of tax competition and demonstrates that different governments use them to different degrees across different taxes. It also shows, however, that governments increasingly engage in tax cooperation to reign in tax arbitrage and competition. While off to a slow start in the 1960s, tax cooperation has gained momentum in recent years, especially after the financial crisis in 2008. Adapted from the source document.
This paper uses the Hotelling-Downs spatial model of electoral competition between candidates to explore competition between political parties. Two parties choose platforms in a unidimensional policy space, and then in a continuum of constituencies with different median voters candidates from the two parties compete in first-past-the-post elections. Departing from party platform is costly enough that candidates do not take the median voters preferred position in each constituency. In equilibrium, parties acting in their candidates best interests differentiate when one party locates right of center, the other prefers to locate strictly left of center to carve out a home turf, consituencies that can be won with little to no deviation from party platform. Hence, Downsian competition that pulls candidates together pushes parties apart. Decreasing campaign costs increases party differentiation as the leftist party must move further from the rightist party to carve out its home turf. For a range of costs, parties take more extreme positions than their most extreme candidates. For small costs, parties are too extreme to maximize voter welfare, whereas for large costs they are not extreme enough.
政策の費用対効果を考えるための新たな枠組みの提案 --生産、消費、労働など多分野への応用に期待--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-07-27. ; To tax or not to tax, is that even a question?: Resolving issues related to tax efficiency assessments. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-07-28. ; This paper provides a comprehensive framework to study welfare effects of multiple policy interventions and other external changes under imperfect competition with emphasis on specific and ad valorem taxation as a leading case. Specifically, in relation to tax pass-through, we provide "sufficient statistics" formulas for two welfare measures under a fairly general class of demand, production cost, and market competition. The measures are (i) marginal value of public funds (i.e., the marginal change in consumer and producer surplus relative to an increase in the net cost to the government), and (ii) incidence (i.e., the ratio of a marginal change in consumer surplus to a marginal change in producer surplus). We begin with the case of symmetric firms facing both unit and ad valorem taxes to derive a simple and empirically relevant set of formulas. Then, we provide a substantial generalization of these results to encompass firm heterogeneity by using the idea of tax revenue that is specified as a general function parameterized by a vector of policy instruments including government and non-government interventions and costs other than taxation.
AbstractThis paper investigates the causal relationship between competition and firm innovation and the impact of competition on firm productivity in the Mexican manufacturing sector. We use the analytical framework proposed by Aghion et al. (2005) and evaluate their central hypothesis. We use firm‐level data from the Mexican manufacturing survey over the period 2009–2017. Our results show a negative linear relationship between competition and the intensity of firm innovation investment. These results are primarily due to the substantial technological disparity that exists across firms within sectors, where most firms compete very far from the leaders.
Abstract Telecommunications policy has come a long way from regulation of vertically integrated monopolies to the current state of competition. As competition becomes self-sustainable, will telecommunications policy in the form of industry-specific regulation go away or, if not, what form will it take? The economics literature suggests that the regulatory efficiency frontier is shifted by new technological and market developments, such as convergence of networks, fixed-mobile substitution (and integration) and next generation access networks. The frontier is also affected by the existing capital stock and other physical and institutional characteristics of a country. The insights from a review of the theoretical and empirical literature are applied to five policy areas. They are: (1) termination monopoly; (2) local bottleneck access; (3) net neutrality; (4) spectrum management; and (5) universal service. While in some of them, deregulation and a move to competition policy will soon be the efficient state of the art, regulation will remain efficient in others for some time. Deregulation will likely become efficient for one-way access and universal service, with the exception of some universal service policies in remote areas and for the poor. Termination will move to bill and keep with a duty to interconnect. In addition, some (more symmetric) regulation should persist for net neutrality in the form of transparency requirements, (quasi-) common carrier obligations and minimum quality standards. Also, spectrum management, while moving towards full-blown ownership rights, will continue to see regulators providing zoning and other services, particularly for unlicensed spectrum. All these assessments are premised on the success of making additional spectrum as the key resource available. They are also premised on the absence of a killer technology like P2P FTTH that potentially dominates all other technologies. What determines the endgame in telecommunications regulation? Although technical and market developments will dominantly shape the regulatory efficiency frontier, institutional and political economy factors have an additional and mostly slowing effect on policy changes.
